By Michael Miner
Not to mention a ton of old-fashioned caring. Publisher David Radler has come to the ad staff both to speak and to listen. “He said, ‘I had no idea’ our salaries were capped,” the salesman tells me, “‘no idea’ our commission plan penalized us once we reach our goal, ‘no idea’ our parking wasn’t paid for, ‘I had no idea you need new computers.’ He said basically no one came to ask him for anything…because he never would have said no.”
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About five years ago, when a milder case of union fever struck the ad department, guild leaders advised them to go slow and do everything by the book. This deliberate approach to insurrection gave the paper’s old management plenty of time to preach the gospel of a union-free workplace, and the movement fizzled out before it even reached the stage of collecting signed cards asking for representation.
There’s a touch of Napoleon in many Hollinger executives, who regard grievance sessions as almost as much fun as winter on the outskirts of Moscow. Briggs fit the mold. She was given to calling Sun-Times advertisers whose buys weren’t big enough and bluntly telling them to get it up. If that’s how she treated the folks she was supposed to woo and win over, imagine her style with the ones she came here to whip into shape.
But in his three and a half years as executive editor Green had become known to reporters as the guy in charge of worrying about how the news would play with advertisers. It’s an unseemly duty, if arguably necessary–“The advertisers are the bread and butter of the newsroom,” says Radler–and it got Green knocked and mocked in this column. A blazing temper didn’t help his reputation. In short, last month’s personnel shift brought sunshine to two departments, as each lost a top exec lots of subordinates couldn’t stand.
With all due respect to Detroit, says the guild, the facts are that there’s never been a single strike at the Sun-Times in the paper’s 50-year history. Will this history of forbearance reassure the rank and file? If it’s proof of adept–not feckless–unionism, it’s evidence of enlightened management too.
But on June 4 it appeared that Clinton had won the war. Keegan, with a reputation as a serious scholar to maintain, marveled at his own error. “I didn’t want to change my beliefs,” he wrote, “but there was too much evidence accumulating to stick to the article of faith–held by all military analysts outside a few beleaguered departments of air power studies in the service academies–that air forces could not, on their own, win wars. If it turned out otherwise in the Balkans, I wrote at the time, many military analysts, me included, were going to look foolish. It now does look as if air power has prevailed in the Balkans and that the time has come to redefine how war may be won.”
